Nobody

"Merry Go Round" kicked All Shook Down off with a vengence. "One Wink at a Time" brought things down in more ways than one. And then came "Nobody."

The third track is everything its predecessor wanted to be and wasn't and then some. It's another in an even by then long line of Paul Westerberg semi-ballads—meaning songs such as "Unsatisfied," "Achin' to Be," "Within Your Reach," even arguably "Little Mascara" or "Answering Machine," which aren't really ballads in the conventional sense, but where the tempos are mid-range but the heart is worn on the sleeve even more obviously than usual...and for Westerberg, that's saying something.

But unlike the previous track, on "Nobody" absolutely everything goes right—when it comes to the recording, that is, if very much not for the narrator or his subject.

There have been few writers in rock and roll quite like Paul Westerberg. He doesn't have Bob Dylan's intimate knowledge of poets famous and obscure. He doesn't have Stevie Wonder's unreal melodic imagination. What he does have is a knack for wordplay rarely even attempted, never mind equaled, by anyone since Cole Porter.

Westerberg finds unusual phrases, and double or even triple meanings in words, and delights in surprising juxtapositions. The opening to "Nobody," for instance, is a perfect example:

Heartaches on your wedding day

The one thing, of course, which a wedding day isn't supposed to have is heartaches. (Well, isn't it ironic? Don't you think?) Which instantly raises the question of whose wedding day and are they the one with the heartache? Also, is it more than one heartache, or is it that the heart aches? Whatever it is, it's hard to imagine any of the peers of the Replacements—R.E.M., Sonic Youth, the Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, the Pixies, Dinosaur Jr—coming up with that opening.

The second line clears things up:

Double takes when they look my way

Obviously, it's not likely it's the singer's wedding.

Knees quake, there ain't a shotgun in the place
You like the frosting, you just bought the cake
Your eyes can't fake

The juxtaposition of the inherent violence of a shotgun wedding with the presumed sweetness of a wedding cake is absolute perfection. As is comparing the cake itself—substantive if not necessarily healthy—with the frosting, which is of course nothing but empty calories designed for temporary pleasure, both in terms of visuals and flavor.

And then we get to the chorus:

Still in love with nobody
And I won't tell nobody 

And almost immediately the song shoots to the very top of the pile of Great Paul Westerberg songs—and that's a pretty tall damn pile.

It's interesting that with the last two lines of that first verse, this song could very easily have gone down an Eagles-like path of comfortably consumed misogyny. But as Westerberg had already proven several years before with "Androgynous," he was not just an unusually gifted songwriter, he was unusually woke for a straight white guy who grew up in the midwest in the 70s. But that chorus takes any hint of derision or blame away from the song's object and instead they enter into an unspoken conspiracy, putting them both on the same level, and yet in a remarkably sympathetic and unjudgmental way—especially surprising given, as the very first line highlights, the emotional turmoil of the situation.

The bridegroom drags you 'cross that room
Said "I do" but honey you were just a kid
Your eyes said I did 

The first line of the second verse are interesting in that it's a standard wedding scene, one most people have witnessed, in person or in a movie, and there's nothing really untoward about it...except that, given the context of the first verse and chorus, it has at the very least a melancholy—rather than joyous—feel, and possibly even ever so slightly sinister. And then, with those last lines, we have classic Westerberg wordplay of the sort never even broached by even the finest writers of his generation, as he takes the most famous and common of wedding phrases and spins them around.

Still in love with nobody
Nobody, nobody
And I won't tell nobody 

Take a look on your wedding night
In your wedding book see what name I signed 

We'll get back to this devastating bridge—which, oddly, seems to modulate down a full step, an unusual move for a pop song—in a bit.

There's a guitar solo, back in the original key, almost certainly played by Westerberg, and it's an interesting one. It's relatively tasteful—perhaps a bit too raucous, tonally, to really be tasteful—with a plethora of bends. It's mainly half and whole notes, with a sprinkling of quarter notes and only a few eighth notes, and no sixteenths. It's somehow reminiscent of solos such as "Smells Like Teen Spirit" which restate the melody, despite the fact it's got nothing in common with the song's main tune.

We get the final verse, which is a return to the wedding reception, and more of the same sad scene:

Hips shake to the band for old time's sake
Now you make your getaway and you're waving to the stage 

Note that reference to the stage—we'll get back to that too.

Another dive into the chorus, but this time the plot doesn't so much thicken as a key detail is revealed:

But on the last page says
Love nobody
And I won't tell nobody
Yeah you're still in love with nobody
And I used to be nobody
Not anymore

And that's the final arrow that pierces both the veil and, fatally, the listener's heart. The multiple uses of the word "nobody" suddenly become multifaceted, as they can now all mean at least two and often three things. All along we've been told that there's no one she loves. But it turns out that it's the narrator with whom she's still in love. He's the nobody in question. What a beautiful twist of fate.

Except by calling himself "nobody," further questions are raised. Is he merely being self-deprecating? Does he mean it? Does he feel he's no one if he's not able to be with her? Is he perhaps referring to the state of his career?

Because as with so many things Westerberg, especially around this point in his catalog, it's easy to look at his lyrics and see how they could very well apply to not only his romantic interests, but to his relationship with his bandmates, or the music industry at large. And after the near misses of Pleased to Meet Me and especially the designed to be a mass hit Don't Tell a Soul, it's not difficult to view this song as a metaphor for his failed love affair with the music industry, especially given that it was produced by Scott Litt, who'd had such monstrous success with R.E.M.

Looked at through this lens, the hips shaking to the band for old time's sake, the getaway, the stage, they all seem redolent of an epitaph, especially with the benefit of hindsight.

Except Westerberg was the one who'd tried to leave the band, tried to make a solo album. He was the one who'd had one foot out the door for some time. So perhaps projection on his part? Maybe this song is actually from the POV of the other band members, who were far from unaware that Paul had fallen out of love with the band?

But let's take a step back to that bridge. It's a devastating couplet...but, really, who looks at their guest book on their wedding night? Is anyone really that disinterested on that night of all nights? Is she really that not in love with her now-husband?

Maybe. Or maybe it turns out that the heartbroken and heartbreaking singer of this fabulous song is the most unreliable narrator since Holden Caulfield (or Patrick Bateman). Maybe she's perfectly happy and he's just a Nice Guy™ standing there internally screaming "you'll be sorry! He can't love you like I can! You'll come crawling back, just you wait!"

But probably not. More likely the singer's reliability is as solid as the word "nobody."

Lyrically, the song is a masterpiece, with more exquisitely parsed out detail than most excellent short stories. Musically, the song is perfection, with the gentle acoustic guitars, and the electric guitar solo that's both graceful and searing. Westerberg's vocals are some his best, with his approachable timbre tinged with his rock rasp perfectly carrying his extraordinary melody: the lyrics and the tune are, unlike the bride and groom, a perfect match. Harmonically, the song is mainly a I-IV-V composition, with brief but vital dips into ii and vi chords to lead into the chorus.

The credits for All Shook Down are notoriously hard to parse, with "Attitude" being the only one that's definitively known to be all four band members. So there's no way of knowing for sure who's playing drums on "Nobody," but I'm pretty much convinced it's Chris Mars. The playing is sparse and tasteful and restrained in a way that the famously untrained and practiced Mars wasn't thought to be—but the drummer on this track sounds just like the guy who played "Can't Hardly Wait" and, especially, "Achin' to Be,", most clearly in the hi-hat pattern—those quarter notes on the almost but not quite entirely closed hats are extremely unusual for a ballad (or balladish) song, and the fact that Mars had played it on the earlier "Achin' to Be" indicates that either he's also the player here or that—despite Westerberg's later claims to the contrary—his was precisely the sound Paul was searching for, and either he or Litt requested this approach, or the drummer himself had heard enough 'Mats to know exactly what to do: play like Chris Mars.

Because you know who was a better drummer for the Replacements than Christopher Mars?

Nobody.